Creator of the Infinite Banking Concept
R. Nelson Nash
1931 to 2019
R. Nelson Nash sold life insurance for 35 years before he wrote the book he is known for. Becoming Your Own Banker came out of a seminar he taught to a test group of eighteen people, and it laid out what he called the Infinite Banking Concept: using a dividend-paying whole life policy as the place you hold and recover your own capital, instead of handing that job to a bank.
He died in 2019 at 88. BetterWealth sat down with him in June 2018, in what turned out to be the last year of his life.
Known for
Becoming Your Own Banker, the book that put the concept in writing. He also wrote Building Your Warehouse of Wealth.
Infinite Banking: financing your own purchases through a dividend-paying whole life policy, so the interest and the recovery of capital come back to you instead of to a lender.
Austrian economics. He was blunt about it with us: "If it weren't for Austrian economics, that book would not exist."
In 2018, less than a year before he died, the Foundation for Economic Education gave Nash its Blinking Lights Award for his work promoting free market economics.
What he actually argued
- Rate of return is the wrong first question.
- Nash argued that people judge a policy as an investment and miss what it is for. The thing he pointed at was control of the banking function, not the yield on the contract.
- The policy works like a trust.
- He used an analogy from practitioner Jim Kenry. You are the grantor, the insurance company is the trustee, your beneficiary is the beneficiary. Nobody asks how much the trustee is making. They ask how well the trustee is doing for the other two parties.
- It is a family system, not a product.
- Nash and his wife started a policy on every grandchild at birth, 2,000 dollars of premium from him and the same again from the parent, and stopped paying at 22. He said the point was that his grandchildren would never need a bank.
- Imagination is the real constraint.
- He opened the relevant chapter with Einstein on imagination mattering more than knowledge, and told us that is what decides whether a person can actually use the concept or not.
In his own words
“Money hasn't left our community in over 30 years. No car financing, no mortgages, no nothing.”
“If they do what I say, they'll never see a bank in their life.”
“The banking function is in the hands of the wrong people.”
On BetterWealth
BetterWealth founder Caleb Guilliams met Nash early in his career and interviewed him in June 2018. BetterWealth is not affiliated with the Nelson Nash Institute. Infinite Banking Concept is a registered trademark of the Nelson Nash Institute.
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